Monday, 14 January 2013

An Interview with Caroline Jane Tully

Following on from last month's interviews with Pagan Studies scholarsChasand Dave(no, not that Chas and Dave!) today I cast my eye over to the other side of the world to talk Witchcraft, Paganism, and archaeology with Australia's very own Caroline Jane Tully. A practicing Pagan Witch, Tully will be well known to many for her numerous articles in Pagan and esoteric anthologies, as well as for her recent opinion piece on cognitive dissonance in the Pagan community which appeared in the pages of The Pomegranate. Like myself, she is an archaeologist by training, and is currently working on her PhD over at the University of Melbourne. I ask her about life as an occultist and academic in the Land of Oz....

EDW: Over the past decade, you've appeared in a number of press articles over in Australia where you have openly discussed your Pagan faith and identity as a practising Witch. How did you first become involved in the Pagan scene, and could you tell us a little more about your personal spiritual path ?I’ve
been a Witch since 1985, but I’ve always had a strong Thelemic
(Aleister Crowley) component to my beliefs and practise, mainly
because two of my most influential magickal instructors, David
Mattichak and Barrington Sherman, were inclined that way. I’m also
quite partial to Anton La Vey – unpopular as he is, but then again I’m partial to many things, especially Pagan
Reconstructionism, the attempt to practise historically-accurate ancient pagan religions. Frankly, I have so many interests in the realm of paganism,
witchcraft, magick and the occult that I have to rotate them every so
often so they all get a turn.

In
1986 I met my first Wiccan Witches when my (then) partner and I moved to
rural Central Victoria and a whole new world was opened up to me:
this was my introduction to public Pagan festivals such as the Mount Franklin Annual Pagan Gathering where I met loads of other Witches,
and alternative lifestyle festivals such as the Down to Earth Confest. Around 1991 I discovered the American organisation, The Church of All Worlds (CAW), whilst reading a copy of Green Egg
Magazine (in fact the magazine was owned by the above-mentioned Wiccan Witches)
and for interest’s sake I passed this information on to two friends
of mine, Fiona Judge and Anthorr Nomchong. They decided to take the
next step and actually become members of this organisation as well as
import it into Australia.

Initially I saw no point in membership in an American association, but in order to help Fiona and Anthorr (and because, I admit, I was intrigued) I also ended up joining the Church of All Worlds in 1992, first as a member of the Canberra-based, Draconis Nest, (because "Nests" – the smallest type of group in the Church – needed a certain amount of people to be chartered), and subsequently forming my own group, Primeval Soup Nest, in Melbourne. The Canberra group mainly consisted of public servants (it was in the Australian Capital Territory after all) and students from the Australian National University of varying ages, while the Melbourne group consisted mostly of a mixture of professionals, some like Nigel Cooper and myself, were professional Tarot Readers. There was a strong link at the time between the Canberra and Sydney Pagan scenes, the Church of All Worlds getting much inspiration from Tim Hartridge’s Eostre Gathering, which they then attempted to incorporate into their annual festival the Pagan Summer Gathering.

The Church of All Worlds has a 9-Circle system of
progressive involvement and in 1994 I was initiated into the 5th
Circle, as a Scion of the Church of All Worlds. By this stage Fiona
had gone over to America and been ordained, so she initiated me as a
Scion, and the plan was that Anthorr and myself would follow suit
with ordination and that the church, as a foreign religious body in
Australia, would be able to provide legal Pagan clergy. But it didn’t
quite happen like that and to discuss what did happen may compromise
people’s privacy, so I won’t – although it was never a secret
at the time. The Church of All Worlds still exists in Australia
although I haven’t been involved with them for years and in the
main I don’t think the current members are even aware of how it got
here.

In
1993, while still a member of CAW, I also became a member of the
Melbourne-based "Wizards of Oz" which was a sub-branch of theOrdo Templi Orientis(OTO) and over the next few years I underwent
initiation into several of the degrees within the Order. During the
late 90s I became very involved in formulating an Australian approach
to Paganism, primarily concentrating on the traditional Wheel of the
Year and how it did, or did not, gel with the Australian seasons (see here and here).I
also published a chapter on this, "The
Sabbats" in Practising
the Witch's Craft. (ed.)
Douglas Ezzy (Allen and Unwin, 2003). Then
in 1999 I started working for WitchCraft
Magazine.
I’d kept going to festivals such as Mount Franklin through the 90s,
and us CAW-OTO members and friends used to host a huge annual Samhain
party in late April (southern hemisphere!), which still happens
thanks to Philippe Duquesnoy, although I haven’t been for over a
decade. In the early 2000’s I got jack of the Pagan social scene –
not Paganism itself, just the constant intrigues in the scene – and
became a hermit, although that didn’t last for long and by the mid
2000s I was back in the OTO (albeit a different incarnation thereof)
to do more initiations. I stayed with them for perhaps two years, and
then went back to being an antisocial misanthrope – although I was
still writing and conversing with Pagans both in Australia and
overseas. I also went back to university in 2004 and, while still
identifying as a Pagan and a Witch, my focus, both magickal and
mundane, has increasingly been upon my research.

EDW:
In the late 1980s and 1990s, you attained qualifications working with
textiles and tapestry making, a field that you worked in
professionally before deciding to enter academia in 2004, studying
archaeology at the University of Melbourne. What spurred this
decision to make such a big change in your life, and was it at all
influenced by your personal spiritual beliefs and identity?

I had originally learned spinning and weaving at the Council for Adult Education back in 1985, and continued with it whilst living in the country – I was a wannabe hippy after all – and I also did an Advanced Certificate of Studio Textiles at the Melbourne College of Textiles in 1990–1. The year after I graduated from Monash University where I attained a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art with a major in woven tapestry and printmaking, I
started working at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (1996). Back
then it was called the Victorian Tapestry Workshop because the
Australian state in which it is in is called Victoria, but we
realised that Americans [EDW: and Britons!] thought that "Victorian" meant "of the Victorian era" so we changed it. The Director of the
Tapestry Workshop, Sue Walker, saw some of my artworks in a group
show at ROAR Gallery in Melbourne and then phoned me up and hired me.
I worked there for fourteen years making Gobelin style, haute
lisse (high
warp) tapestries for private, corporate and government clients.

The
Tapestry Workshop valued "artistic" personalities and so it was
perfectly fine for me to be an "out" Pagan there, in fact some of
the interviews I did in newspapers were specifically through media
contacts at my workplace. So, working at the Tapestry Workshop was
like an extension of my Monash University fine art course because we
had to deal with [mainly Australian] art all day, and were constantly
showered with art magazines and invitations to exhibition openings.
Consequently I was pretty up to date with the state of the Arts in
Melbourne, at least the visual arts. Now I have to subscribe to Art
Almanac to
know what’s going on!

Tully (right) the tapestry weaver

So,
how did I get from the Tapestry Workshop to Melbourne University? My
Paganism always went hand in hand with study – of history, magick,
ancient religions, anthropology, feminism, ecology, basically the
components of contemporary Paganism – but in a non-academic
capacity. I have always written for popular Pagan magazines, I worked
for six years as a feature writer, reviewer, news and events editor
and general "witchcraft stylist" for Australia’s only glossy –
and paying! – magazine devoted to Witchcraft, called
imaginatively WitchCraft
Magazine,
and I have several chapters in popular anthologies. It was through
pure luck that, in 1999, a Pagan friend who was an academic at the
time, mentioned Chas Clifton’s NATREL email list which is now the
Pagan Studies Scholars email list. It was there that I started to
realise that there were fascinating academic conversations going on
about Paganism but that in order to participate in those
conversations, indeed in order to even understand quite a lot of
their content, I would need to "learn academia" myself. That was
one of the reasons that I eventually enrolled at the University of
Melbourne in Classics and Archaeology. I would have done Religious
Studies if they’d had it, but they don’t. There was also a great
Witchcraft History course there for years too, which I think has gone
now, but I wanted to study early “pagan” religions.

The
other reason I went back to university was because after the
publication of Ronald Hutton’s book The
Triumph of the Moon in
1999, I – and probably many other Pagans – had started to become
suspicious of the "histories" that certain Pagan leaders were
telling us. Everyone knows the claims such Pagan leaders make and
they have become a bit of a joke: "Paganism is exactly like Stone
Age religion"; "in ancient matriarchal times women, especially
priestesses, ruled"; "the people persecuted as witches in the
European Witch Trials were our direct spiritual forebears"; "ancient Paganism was practised exactly like Wiccan ritual"; "Witches were the clergy and Pagans were the laity"… that sort
of thing. I’d already started investigating historical pagan
religions, mainly Greek and Roman as well as a bit of Heathenry, in
conjunction with the Pagan Reconstructionist scene. And I was
starting to be able to differentiate between historical and more
recent Paganisms, such as the Frazer-inspired 1950s Paganism such as
Wicca and its derivatives. It sounds crazy, but it wasn’t that
clear to me back then! Anyway, I wanted to hear what academics who
study ancient religions, and who were not Pagans and had no
investment in Paganism, had to say about ancient pagan religions so I
could compare such religions with the claims of modern Paganism. And
of course I found that ancient "pagan" religions look nothing
like contemporary Paganism – unless we’re talking about Pagan
Reconstructionism, but even then there is a lot removed from it to
make it palatable to modern sensibilities.

Tully excavating in the Middle East

So,
it wasn’t so much in order to confirm my spiritual beliefs that I
went to Melbourne University, but to have them challenged and
possibly destroyed. Most Pagan Studies scholars seem to be in
disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, religious studies,
theology, history and archaeology. I didn’t go to university in
order to be a Pagan Studies scholar specifically, but to study
ancient pagan religions and to compare them with modern Paganism. I
did a Graduate Diploma and a Postgraduate Diploma in Classics and
Archaeology, because at the time I was very into Roman religion and
involved in Nova Roma, a Pagan Reconstructionist group. I still love
Roman religion. While doing these courses I did an interesting
archaeology subject called "Archaeology of Cult" where I
discovered ancient Israelite religion – I already knew about the "Hebrew Goddess" from Raphael Patai’s book of the same name,
but I didn’t realise that there was much more exciting material to
study in ancient Israel until I did that course. Now I’m doing a
PhD on tree cult in the prehistoric Aegean (Crete and mainland
Greece), Cyprus and Israel. While my overall interest is in the way
that humans can have a "religious" relationship with "other-than-human-persons" such as trees and rocks, I’m mainly
looking at the way ideology can work in conjunction with an animistic
worldview (which is often considered to be a rather benevolent and
idealistic kind of "spirituality") to legitimise elite Minoans of
Neopalatial-period Crete.

EDW:
Your Master’s dissertation was devoted to the influence of Ancient
Egypt and Egyptology over various occultists in late 19th and early
20th century Britain, and has subsequently seen publication in three
parts, one in The Pomegranate journal, another in the Ten Years of
the Triumph of the Moon festschrift for Ronald Hutton, edited by Dr
Evans and Dr Green, and another in Women’s Voices in Magic, edited
by Brandy Williams. What are your particular feelings towards this
research project of yours, and do you see yourself returning to this
fascinating area in future?

Actually,
it wasn’t a Masters, it was an Honours thesis. I haven’t done a
Masters; I went from 4th year to a PhD. I adore this topic and
considered doing a PhD on it. However, I also have fervent interests
in many other topics; it’s hard to pay attention to them all. My
thesis was on the use of aspects of ancient Egyptian religion by four
members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell
MacGregor Mathers, Moina Mathers, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley
– all of whom were major figures in the British occult scene of the
late 19th/early 20th centuries and are really terribly important
forebears of the modern Pagan scene. Besides focusing on them I also
had a chapter in the thesis on the relationship of contemporary
Pagans to archaeology in Britain, some of which has ended up in my
article discussed below. So, my thesis was on a kind of Egyptomania,
a topic I’m extremely interested in both from the angle of the
history of Western Esotericism as well as the use of Egyptian Style
in architecture and the decorative arts. This kind of topic is really
classified as "Reception Studies" – how the ancient world is
received, utilised, and expressed by later movements, groups, or
individuals, rather than archaeology per se. Although in regards to
my thesis it did incorporate aspects of the history of the discipline
of Egyptology as well. Reception Studies is huge in Classics, but
less so in archaeology, at least at my university. Anyway, I adore
this topic, and certainly will get back to it. I’m also quite
partial to romantic Hellenism, the romanticisation of ancient Greece,
particularly by people such as the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) –
I’m going to get onto that when I have time. In this regard I am
mainly interested in how the past is utilised for self-aggrandisment,
for creating a romantic, authoritive persona. This is something
contemporary Pagans do too, not all of them, but certainly some, and
I’m very interested in that.

EDW:
Many of my readers will know you for your opinion piece published in
a recent volume of The Pomegranate; entitled “Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a response by practitioner Pagans to academic research on the history of Pagan religions”. You argued that many non-academic Pagans were reacting negatively
to academic scholarship which challenged their own particular
conceptions of the past due to the psychological phenomenon of
cognitive dissonance. Although your primary hypothesis seemed to be
uncontroversial among Pagan Studies scholars and other academics (at
least those whom I talked to), it was bitterly attacked by at least
one very vocal figure from within the Pagan community itself. How did
this paper come about, and what is your response to this varied
response and the wider issues that it raises regarding the
relationship between academia and the communities whom we study?

Yes,
it was weird that I received such a negative response from the person
you mention, as can be seen inthe comments section on your blog. But then again, it is exactly what I should expect as that paper came
about because I was shocked at the way two Pagan Studies scholars,
Chas Clifton and Peg Aloi, were attacked on the internet for mildly
criticising New Zealand Wiccan, Ben Whitmore’s, bookTrials of the Moonwhich attempted in turn to critique
Ronald Hutton’s book, The Triumph of the Moon. I say "attempted" because we all know that it failed because it was not rigorous
enough. So, my article originated as a result of what I witnessed
when non-academic Pagan practitioners thoroughly over reacted to Chas
and Peg’s critiques and I was taken aback at the level of vitriol –
it’s all recorded onChas’andPeg’sblogs and other places.

Consequently,
I should not have been at all surprised that I also got a negative
response to my article. That paper was actually originally presented
at the Research Network on Transcultural Identities conference in May
2011 at the University of Melbourne, and then at the Pagan Studies
session at the American Academy of Religion conference in San
Francisco in November 2011. The paper was accompanied by quite funny
PowerPoint slides, which, had the shouty critic of which we speak
(above) seen, he might have understood that I wasn’t slagging off
Pagans – as I am one myself – but suggesting, with a good dose of
humour, that both Pagans and academic researchers of Paganism could
communicate better, as I think it’s the lack of communication that
causes vitriolic outbursts as seen on Chas and Peg’s blogs, and in
other places: such as in response to my article... and my interviews
with Ronald Hutton (here and here)... andSasha Chaitow’s interview with me in Fainomena Magazine… and wherever else good Pagan Studies scholars are to be found.
The angry comments aren’t all on my blog, but around the internet
in various places. Anyway, I tried to explain myself, and the
article, inan interview on Jason Pitzl Waters’ blog, The Wild
Hunt, early this year, but I did not participate in, or even read, the
comments on that as I went overseas soon after and didn’t have
time.

EDW:
As both a Pagan and an academic, what future do you see for the
fields of Pagan Studies and Esoteric Studies, and what is your own
personal take on the debate as to whether “insiders” can be
trusted to study within these fields with any degree of impartiality,
an issue which has been recently reignited by Danish scholar Markus
Altena Davidsen ?

Well,
Esoteric Studies seems to be very sophisticated and interesting. I
met some of the well-known academics in that discipline, such as
Wouter Hanegraaff and Antoine Faivre, at the American Academy of
Religion conference. It seems to be a fascinating area of study which
I, of course, would love to be involved in, but I’m not –
unfortunately, I can’t do everything! I’m not sure however,
whether Esoteric Studies suffers from the kinds of criticism that
Davidsen has directed toward Pagan Studies, as I don’t tend to keep
up with the literature or converse regularly with the participants.
Speaking of Davidsen’s article, yes, my friend Shai Ferraro, co-organiser of the Conference of Contemporary Religion and Spirituality at the University of Tel Aviv, first alerted me to it. I’m
not a Religious Studies scholar, so I don’t tend to know what the
current thinking is on researching religion in that discipline,
although I get the idea from Davidsen’s article. Consequently I
can’t critique the way in which Pagan Studies is approached from a
Religious Studies angle. I must say however, that when I first
encountered the academic study of Paganism – which, as I mentioned
above, was via Chas Clifton’s Nature Religions email list, and from
there the scholars who at that time were researching contemporary
Paganism – I did get the impression that they were very uncritical
about modern Paganism and a bit on the idealistic, promoting-Paganism
side of things. In fact it did not seem OK to be critical about
Paganism, although people certainly were – but not critical enough
in my opinion. I certainly agree with Davidsen that "A normative
construction of the essence of contemporary Paganism" is prevalent
in the academic study of Paganism and that "The ideal of what
Paganism ought to be according to certain Pagan intellectuals is
presented as how real or pure Paganism is." I’ve certainly
encountered a reasonable amount of naïve idealism from
academics-turned-Pagan who have a particular idea of how Paganism "is" and, because they have clout and credibility deriving from
their academic status, are able to present their view to a pretty
receptive audience, whether that be through lectures at a university,
publications, or media interviews and thus formulate a "Paganism" that they like the idea of, rather than as it really is. I certainly
think that Paganism itself needs to be analysed more critically, as
well as the academic scholarship thereof, so I think Davidsen’s
article is useful in this regard.

EDW:
From modern esotericism, you’ve turned your attention many
centuries back in time in order to study for a PhD in Aegean
Archaeology at the University of Melbourne; your thesis is titled
“The Cultic Life of Trees: What trees say about people in the
prehistoric Aegean, Cyprus, and Israel.” Could you tell us a little
more about what you are investigating here?

Well,
there are these gold rings and stone seals from Minoan Crete (some
are from mainland Greece but in Minoan style) dating to the
Neopalatial period, 1750–1450 BCE, that depict images in which
figures interact with trees in what has been interpreted as a
religious manner. Influenced by the biblical text, and later on by
Ugaritic texts, such scenes have been suggested to depict worshippers
and a tree goddess, such as the Hebrew Asherah or the Egyptian Hathor
– and this might be correct. There are no texts to confirm this
however as the Minoan script, Linear A, is not translated, and while
Linear B used later on Crete is known to be a form of Greek, it
doesn’t really tell us that much about religion. Also, these rings
are tiny and one needs to ask whether such scenes depicted thereon
are accurate renditions of something that happened in the real world,
or rather, are highly edited "signs". From the beginning of
research into these images at the start of the 20th century, the
iconography has been used to propose and speculate about
corresponding physical sites within the landscape of Crete and the
rituals that occurred there. There has not been much rigorous work
done in the way of matching, or eliminating, actual cult sites in
regard to the iconography however – in the case of Minoan Crete,
these sites would be peak sanctuaries, rural sanctuaries, sacred
caves, and urban cult sites. Yes, people have studied this, but in a
rather cursory manner.

Previous
scholarship has been too generalising, and subsequently imprecise, in
regards to analysing the spatial layout and especially the built
components surrounding trees within glyptic images. What are most
probably different types of structures such as walls, stone altars,
and wooden constructions in conjunction with trees, have been
conflated as just "walls" or just "shrines". Images of trees
without architectural elaboration have been considered to depict cult
enacted "in Nature" at an "ephemeral rural sanctuary". The
tree itself has been treated in a predictable, unsophisticated
manner, with interpretations ranging from fruit-harvesting, to it
being simply a marker of a ritual site, or a vaguely numinous
manifestation of primitive religion. Only very recently have scholars
begun to consider the tree in relation to its potential place in more
sophisticated politico-religious settings. I am trying to do a more
analytical analysis of the components of the images of tree cult, as
well as any three dimensional sites within the landscape where such
cult may have occurred. I hope to be able to propose reconstructions
of cultic procedure, ritual focus and religious aims, but the
archaeology of cult is a difficult subject because you are trying to
understand what ancient people thought, although to an extent the
material traces they left gives you some idea.

Yes,
I’ve had chapters in several anthologies, but unfortunately I
haven’t written a whole book. Hopefully my PhD will end up as a
book. Before I went back to Uni I wrote for popular magazines and was
in a few popular anthologies, as I said above. I think that these
anthologies are a great way to bring together themed articles by
different writers, and they do tend to be of a high standard. I do
wonder about the actual saleability of hard copy Pagan books now,
however, because there is just so much free information on the internet. But of course not everything is on the internet and some
old fashioned types prefer to read actual paper books (even if it
does cause the death of trees!). Memento
Mori had
so many submissions that it had to be divided into two parts. In
Volume I which has recently come out, I have an article on the
Eleusinian Mysteries called "Demeter’s Wrath: How the Eleusinian
Mysteries Attempted to Cheat Death" and in Volume II, which is not
available yet, I have an article on the figure of the Roman
horror-witch and how it influenced later ideas about Witches, called "Erichtho: Wicked Witch of the West."

During
my Graduate and Postgraduate Diplomas I tended to publish my
university essays – it seemed a waste to just hand them in and get
a mark, I’d spent ages on them! That’s where my two pieces
in Memento
Mori came
from, as well as other articles such as "The Pythia of Apollo at
Delphi" in Priestesses,
Pythonesses and Sibyls (ed.)
Sorita D'Este (Avalonia, 2008); and "Do the Judean Pillar Figurines
Represent the Goddess Asherah?" and "Aphrodite Hellenised: The
Taming of a Goddess of Sex and Power" both of which are in Tess
Dawson’s Anointed:
A Devotional Anthology for the Deities of the Near and Middle East.
(Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2011). As mentioned above, I published
components of my Honours thesis as "Samuel Liddell Macgregor
Mathers and Isis" in Ten
Years of Triumph? Academic Approaches to Studying Magic and the
Occult: Examining scholarship into witchcraft and paganism ten years
after Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon.
(eds.) Dave Evans and Dave Green (Hidden Publications, 2009); "Florence and the Mummy" in Women’s
Voices in Magic.
(ed.) Brandy Williams (Megalithica Books, 2009); and "Walk Like an
Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley’s Reception of The
Book of the Law." The
Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies 12:1.
2010.

But
I don’t just write things. Although while working at the Tapestry
Workshop I hardly ever had time to make my own artworks, we
did have exhibitions of our own stuff every so often; now I have more
time to spend on making things. Consequently I have three artworks in
the forthcomingLinden Gallery’s annual Postcard Showwhich
runs from 2 Feb to 28 March 2013. You can see the kinds of things I
do here, although these are from a previous exhibition: (here and here). I like making things, but ultimately I think that studying and
writing is more stimulating, important and useful.EDW: Thank you for taking the time out to talk with Albion Calling today, Caroline, and good luck with your doctoral thesis!

8 comments:

Not all non-academic Pagans are opposed to proper historical and anthropological perspectives - as witness the popularity of Pagans for Archaeology, a group for Pagans who support archaeological investigation of sites & remains; and also the number of Pagan practitioners (in the UK at least) who respect and admire Ronald Hutton.

Thank you for your kind words, it's good to hear that people are enjoying my endeavours on this blog.

I don't think that either Ms Tully or any other academic involved in Pagan Studies really believes that all non-academic Pagans take such an anti-intellectual and/or anti-academic stance. Clearly, a large percentage of non-academic Pagans are very interested in historical and archaeological scholarship into the pre-Christian past, as well as the work produced by Pagan Studies scholars such as myself. At the same time, we don't expect Pagans to take our findings for granted, and on the whole are happy to listen to well-argued, constructive criticism from the Pagan community.

However, at the same time we cannot ignore the existence of a vocal minority of Pagans, active primarily on the internet, who are taking a very hostile approach to Pagan Studies. Not only have they criticised the research and publications of academics in this field, but they have stepped beyond this to make personal and borderline slanderous attacks on the characters of the scholars themselves. I personally believe that it is this latter aspect of their critique that has put Pagan Studies scholars on the defensive in recent years.

Hi Yewtree, yes as Ethan said the hostility is mainly on the internet. When I met Ronald Hutton in the UK in April 2012 (and I met both of you there too!!!) he also said that he thought that the vitriol was mainly in the internet. He also said that it was not particulary something that UK Pagans encountered much, and was mainly a phenomena of what I would call (not him, I'm calling it) the Wiccan/Pagan "diaspora". I know that many Pagans in Australia are not at all aware of it, probably because they either don't hang out on the internet much (what???) or they hang out in different places on the internet. The thing is, as you know, there are so many interesting debates within the broader "umbrella" of Paganism, but there shouldn't be this need to approach them with a poison-tipped rocket-propelled grenade.

For any interested readers, Hutton elaborates on these ideas in his latest review article, "Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History", published in the 13(2) issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies (https://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/POM/article/view/16291).

I find it unfortunate that such behaviour has caused yourself (or anyone else in the Pagan and esoteric communities), to self-censor or give up on productive endeavours that they might otherwise have undertaken. I hope that if, in future, you feel the desire to write and publish your thoughts, that you will not be hindered by these vitriolic "Counter-Revisionists" as Hutton has recently called them.

It's true, the vitriol is not only confined to the internet. In fact, much (not all, but a lot) of my experience as a Pagan, when meeting other Pagans who I have never met before, is characterised by iciness, haughtiness, and paranoia on _their_ part. I used to get disappointed about this, a friend would say, "Oh, you must meet so-and-so, she's a Druid" or whatever, I'd meet so-and-so and she'd be wary, paranoid, and competitive - BOR-ING! Well, we can hardly have a sensible conversation when it's about competing about whatever it is we're apparently competing about. Only last year I met some Pagans at a festival that a very old associate assured me were really nice and whom I simply must meet. Well, I'd never met such icy, unfriendly sour-pusses in my life. In fact I hardly 'met' them as they made a point of scowling at and ignoring me. And why? Because, I can only assume, they were terribly concerned with their status vis-a-vis mine and everyone elses'. I don't think I'm imaginging that. I've had years of dealing with magical and Pagan groups in which prestige and hierarchy is important, although it is never admitted in polite circles, so I think I can detect it when I'm conftonted with it. That's what this - this hostility - is about, it's about hierarchical posturing. And the possession of knowledge, or what is thought to be secret knowledge, linked with in-group [and out-group] membership, or lack thereof. One must shun the [perceived] outsider. One simply must! Especially if they look like they might be competition... competition for what...? Fans, followers, prestige, leadership, increased self-esteem... shrug. Hierarchy and prestige, "power over", are characteristics that modern Pagan Witchcraft specifically pretends _do not_ petain to it. And I'm sure that in some [ideal] situations it doesn't. (And Witchcraft is just as magical as magic(k) groups, so don't bother saying "Oh, it's just those hierarchical ceremonial magic groups that are like that"). I'd say that in most cases a dominant individual or couple loves nothing more than being - and staying - the "boss" in a group... when what should be happening is that everyone should be being encouraged to develop and become amazing... to graduate out from under the "teachers". Anyway, as Anton La Vey says, if you pretend that you got into Witchcraft for any reason other than power, you're deluding yourself. But (let me draw breath...) just because Paganism can be annoying, that should not let you be put off from publishing projects or doing any other creative activity. Although the "scenes" can be frustrating, depressing, distracting and exhausting, the topic itself is fascinating and NOBODY OWNS IT or can forbid you from it!!!

Oh, before anyone has an apoplectic fit, can I just say that although I have mentioned a Druid in my post above, I'm not singling out any particular "types" of Pagan here... the example I was talking about was a Druid, the other example were Wiccans (I [or they] think). Paranoid hierarchy-jostling is evident in many types of Pagan and Magickal groups.

About Me

Born, raised, and still residing in the urban sprawl of Greater London, I am a PhD candidate at University College London with a particular interest in the development of cult, ritual, and magic. My published research focuses around two key-themes: pre-Christian religion in Europe, and the reception, re-interpretation and re-use of pre-Christian Europe in a modern context (i.e. contemporary Paganism). Although I have been academically trained in the discipline of archaeology, I am a staunch supporter of interdisciplinary perspectives, and my research has closely intersected with religious studies, history, and folkloristics.
I have a forthcoming academic book, have published nine articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, and have also published twenty-four book and exhibit reviews in six different journals.
I am happy to be contacted at ethan-doyle-white@hotmail.co.uk